


Wandering the Desert (Sea)

by Ashkaztra



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: AU, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Present Tense, Sentient Atlantis, at least kind of sentient Atlantis?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-20
Updated: 2015-04-20
Packaged: 2018-03-24 23:01:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3787582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashkaztra/pseuds/Ashkaztra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone dreams of the sunken city, but his dreams are fire and sand and he has lost his way (never knew his way in the first place).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wandering the Desert (Sea)

John crashes his helicopter (a Boeing AH-64 Apache he affectionately named Jeff) in Afghanistan and walks away from the explosion with a busted leg, severe blood loss and sand everywhere. He walks until he passes out and he wakes up in a military hospital where the doctors say he has been incredibly lucky. 

He dreams of screams and fire and the smell of charred flesh, and about the people who didn't walk away, and he doesn't feel lucky at all. 

Mostly, he just feels wrung out and empty. 

They ship him back to the states for surgery because there's complications, and while in recovery he has two seizures and several migraine outbreaks, and by the time he's well enough to walk around on his own again, he is faced with the very likely possibility of a disability discharge. 

They still tell him he's lucky. 

If his head didn't hurt when he raised his voice, he'd have yelled at them. Instead, he sits on the balcony and watches the rain until they come to fetch him, evening after evening, waiting. 

The papers never materialize. 

In their place, there is a dark-haired woman, another doctor (Doctor Weir, she says, and no, not that kind of doctor), and she talks about genetics and inheritance and about things that sound like something out of a scifi novel until his head hurts even worse. She has hopeful eyes and a kind voice, but John doesn't want any part of it. 

He just wants to be left alone. 

Doctor Weir comes again, with another doctor (Carson Beckett, who is that kind of a doctor), and one more time after that, but John has stopped listening. 

He hasn't listened to much of anything after they told him he'll never fly again. He doesn't need to hear more.

The doctors don't come back. A general comes in their place (General Jack O'Neill, with two l's, not one). He doesn't speak of hope, or magical genetics, or anything else. He speaks of a choice. Join Doctor Weir's team and provide some sort of service still (they're very hazy on what, exactly) or get a disability discharge and go nowhere. 

Neither option appeals to him, but if he leaves the Air Force, he has nowhere to go but home, and he would do a lot to avoid that fate. So he signs himself over to the Atlantis project and is brought to yet another base in the middle of nowhere. 

There is a city, they tell him, a city made by aliens, that rest on the bottom of the sea on a planet in another galaxy, and they need to awaken it (like in the legends). They have been there but they could not stay, and they believe he and others like him (the aliens are his ancestors apparently) are the key to the technology. It sounds grand and impressive enough in theory. In reality, it means nothing but hours upon hours spent with a team of scientists turning things off and on with his mind until he feels like his brain is turning to sand like the desert outside. 

Doctor McKay (also not that kind of doctor) is abrasive and rude, and though it's clear that he doesn't actually mean to be, it grates on John after a while. Doctor Kusanagi (who also has alien ancestors but not as strong genes) and Doctor Zelenka (who constantly runs commentary in Czech and makes John wish he understood) are easier to work with, but he has no real idea what they want from him except some way to save their precious sunken city. John has no idea how to save a sunken city. He has spent most his active time in deserts. 

Water isn't something he knows much about at all, but he knows sand. 

At night, he dreams about sand and fire and screams until he wakes and he's the one screaming. 

In daytime, he turns lights on with his brain until he triggers another migraine and has to take a break. 

It becomes routine, somehow, and he must be better at pretending than he thought because nobody ever questions it. 

Sometimes, Doctor Weir comes to see them and she speaks of the city and the Ancients in lofty, praising tones. She wants to save the city so badly, and she's looking to John to do it (he can't save anyone, though). John doesn't say anything, because he doesn't want to give her false hopes, and he doesn't want to shoot her down in flames. 

He doesn't know what he wants. 

So he does as he's told and tries to understand what they want from him, but sometimes it feels like they don't even know what they want, just that they want it. 

They want their city so bad he can feel it in the back of his mind, like a pressure gauge slowly moving, the needle creeping closer and closer towards the red zone. Sometimes, he thinks his head is going to burst under the pressure (sometimes he wants it to). 

Months pass like that and John almost forgets what sunlight looks like, deep in the hidden base (though never what wind feels like on his face, the draft from the rotors pushing the air). His days are filled with lamps and machinery that light up but fail to produce anything, and rapid-fire discussion from the science team on how all the figures show that it should work until the pressure in his head makes something pop. They always go silent for a while after that, probably because it tends to go with nose bleeds and headaches. 

His nights are nightmares and fire and sand until he feels brittle as glass and just as transparent. 

One day, he arrives in the lab to find chaos. McKay is shoving things into a box, Zelenka is making coffee so strong it can melt paint of the walls, and Kusanagi is desperately trying to keep the two of them from bickering long enough to focus. The scientists are attending an expo somewhere in Europe and they're not prepared (even though they have been working for weeks on this). It doesn't surprise him, John has noticed that everything tends to take second place to the dreams about the city. 

He wishes he dreamed about the city. But he has never seen the city of their dreams, never felt it in his veins like Kusanagi speaks of, and he has no way to understand what it is they want from him. 

Their departure means he cannot work with them until they go back (and he almost asks for a vacation except that it would only mean more nightmares) but McKay is convinced that he is close to making a breakthrough (McKay has been insisting on that since they started). Doctor Weir has found another to monitor him in their absence, they tell him. 

As they leave towards the upper floors, John is escorted further down, like Dante or Orpheus into the underworld, deeper into the complex than he had realised was possible. He has never liked enclosed spaces, and certainly not when they feel like catacombs instead of hallways (like a punishment and not an assignment). 

His escorts are military, Air Force like himself, but they are nervous and fidgety, and it makes him feel on edge (like the fire and the sand had not done so already), like they're taking him to his doom. A sacrifice to be left at the altar.

The room he is ushered into is warm, though, warm and lit exclusively by candles, and though the guards leave him at the door and turn back, John doesn't feel afraid. Alert, yes, but not afraid. 

They have spoken to him of aliens and other galaxies since he arrived, but he has never really thought of it as anything but words. The creature in the room with him (probably also not that sort of doctor, his mind insists hysterically) is real, though, real and scary and entirely too amused at John's expense. He does not speak reverently of sunken cities and alien ancestors, though. In fact, he barely speaks at all, just watches quietly as John turns lights on and off and then he makes a dismissive sound and tells him he is doing it wrong. 

The scientists have him focusing on the universe with him in the centre, but the alien makes him see himself as a part of a large puzzle, a cog in a machine (a grain of sand in a desert). When he feels John is doing it wrong, he stops him and makes him start again, over and over until John is ready to pass out from exhaustion.

When he goes to bed that night, his head doesn't hurt, though, even if it feels heavy with sleep. 

The alien's methods are strange but they work, and John can feel his awareness of the technology around him grow stronger as his headaches begin fading. His nightmares go nowhere, but if he gets out of bed and goes down to the depths of the base to practice, the alien will sit with him and share the fire and the sand. He has burned too, though there was no sand, only darkness and silence, until the project came and took him away, traded one cell for another. 

This cell is the better one, the alien tells him (the other one was dark and painful and John can feel it when they talk of it), and John agrees, because even if he misses the sky, he would rather be here than where he would be if he had chosen to leave. 

They both miss the sky. 

When the scientists return, McKay is clearly annoyed that the alien (the Wraith) has gotten better results from John than he did, but he can't afford to risk it so he lets them continue. 

The Wraith makes him talk while they work, to learn to split his focus, and John talks until he runs out of topics he shares readily. When the words run dry (like the desert, always the desert) the Wraith takes over, speaking of things so far in the past it's staggering, of the places he has been and the things he has seen, until John finds his words again and that's how they work. Back and forth, rhythmically, like they're weaving a pattern. 

Sometimes, John falls asleep in the middle, drooping in his chair, and wakes up in the piled nest of pillows and blankets in the corner (he never dreams of sand and fire there). Sometimes the Wraith sits with him as complicated tubes feed liquid energy into his system (a pale imitation, he says, but better than the madness and the silence)

It becomes a game to them; the Wraith drags John's name out like a threat (or like a promise). John laughs (genuinely) and calls him Todd, because he cannot replicate the sounds of the Wraith's actual name and it wouldn't be right to share that with the others anyway. 

Spring turns into summer and summer into fall, and John sleeps peacefully nine nights out of ten before he reaches out with his mind one day and the world comes alive around him. 

It is sudden and so achingly beautiful and welcoming that he understands the longing at once. It nestles in his heart and dislodges something hard and cold (like glass, fire and sand fused together). The fragments here are just tiny parts of the larger picture, like seedlings from a living city, and John loves them as though they were his own. He sees their secrets now, and passes them on to the science team because he knows they want nothing but their city (his city). They stop him halfway through and tells him to keep the secrets safe until they're home. 

More people come to see them now, important people who mutter and frown, but in the end they are given permission to return. 

John has heard of the gate from many of them, but seeing it is strange. He can feel the gate, too, but it's distant, as though it speaks a different language (sings a different song than the one in his head). There is a murmur of excitement all around him and it's growing like the air before a thunderstorm. 

The Wraith (Todd) is at John's side because he belongs there and nobody protests because they have made sure it isn't worth it. 

They step through the gate together and the city awakes to welcome them home, the song in John's head echoing in every corner. Beneath his feet (his touch) the city surges and rises, water cascading down the towers like an unveiling.

Through the window above their heads, the sky is blue and wide (no longer a dream) and the sunlight makes the city glow. 

In every head (in every heart) the feeling of home echoes loud as thunder.

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea. Sometimes I just write, and stories happen. I guess this is my take on the sentient!Atlantis trope? I need to stop writing fics on Mondays, pretty much. Lack of sleep leads to strange fics. 
> 
> I might do more with this setting sometime. I like having different sandboxes to play in.
> 
> Will I ever stop naming things after Toki no Hourousha? Probably not. 
> 
> Now, back to editing Ithaca!


End file.
